


My Body Is A Temple

by Felurian1



Category: Supernatural
Genre: BAMF Dean Winchester, Episode: s15e09 The Trap, Gen, Hope vs. Despair, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt Sam Winchester, Memories, Protective Sam Winchester, Sam Winchester Has PTSD, Sam Winchester is Not Okay, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:33:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23630125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Felurian1/pseuds/Felurian1
Summary: While Chuck tortures Sam, Sam lets his mind wander to all the times his body has been used to keep other people safe.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 3
Kudos: 72





	My Body Is A Temple

It was in the second hour of torture that Sam felt himself crack a smile. He smothered it immediately, of course, but the thought was still there. Tortured by God himself. Even for a Winchester, this was something. The irony was that Chuck wasn’t even good at it. Sam had been tortured by Lucifer. This was… easy. 

The insane urge to giggle rose again and he expressed it as a groan. Better to let Chuck think he was winning - it might give Dean and Cas the time they needed to do whatever it was they were doing out there.

There was a sudden, massive stab of pain in Sam’s arm, and he looked down to see the muscles of his forearm being parted by the thick of Chuck’s blade. He screamed, because it seemed appropriate, and then let himself go quiet again. This was a pattern he knew. The pain, the time to recover, then the pain again. It was… familiar.

Sam could remember the first time he’d realised his body was a weapon, back when the most they had to worry about was Azazel and his pack of demons. It hadn’t felt good, but it had felt simple. Dean would always be the better hunter, but Sam, he could do things differently. Could use himself, differently. 

Using his body as a shield, on the other hand, that felt pure. It had started before he went to Stanford, in those wild desperate hunts with Dean, when Dad wasn’t around to back them up. 

Dean was always moving, always fighting back even when he was cornered. Sam’s instincts were different. He’d just finishing growing, getting the height and the broad shoulders that had Dean a little jealous, and they were hunting a werewolf in some backwater town out west. Sam could almost taste the dust of the place.

There had been a girl, he remembered that. Her name was Sarah, or Selina, or something like that, and the monster they were hunting was after her. Dean had gone to chase it down, and he was on babysitting duty with the girl. Sam almost laughed again remembering how much he’d hated that.

Eventually, though, the monster came for them, and then it was the usual frantic chase through rooms and doors that fell to splinters under huge clawed hands. Even as they ran Sam knew they weren’t going to make it, he could recall the knowledge of it falling on him like a cloak. So when they reached the final room he did the only thing he could. 

He pushed the girl behind him, his arms spread to hide her, to make him the only target in the room. He was big enough that she was completely covered by his body, and when the wolf came into the room, he was what it sighted on. Sam had just closed his eyes and braced for the snap of teeth when Dean arrived and blew the thing to smithereens. 

The hunt, Sam had almost forgotten, but the feeling had lingered. He turned it over and over in his little seventeen-year-old mind, til he fixed on it. He could do that again. When it came to it, Sam’s body wasn’t just a weapon, it was a shield. A tool for him to use, whatever it took.

The irony was that Dean would never get it. To Dean, as long as his body could do what it needed, which was keep fighting, it wasn’t really there. He’d watched him put away food like a kid on Christmas, drink himself into a coma, sit for hours on his bed watching old cartoons. Dean lived on adrenaline, so as long as he could still push when he needed to, he didn’t care.

Not Sam. It wasn’t for nothing that he ate salad all day, went for runs every morning and evening, drank smoothies where Dean reached for beer. It was for this. Honing the best, most reliable tool he had. And it had worked. Even now when he could feel the pain flowing through his shoulder where Chuck was probing him, when his body was covered in dozens of bleeding wounds, he was holding. And while he held, Dean would have a chance.

Sam knew, in some part of his mind, that this wouldn’t work forever. Eventually Chuck would get bored and start hurting Eileen, and then Sam would have to give him something to keep him interested. That was what torture was about, he’d learned. The give and take. But he was stubbornly clinging to the hope that Dean would come, like he had before, and blow God to smithereens. Knowing his brother, it wasn’t even that unlikely.

Sam had pushed his body like this before. Never mind the hundreds of hunts that ended with Sam flinging himself desperately between the monster and the civilians. Never mind the dozens of times he’d hunched, eyes closed, over a child while he waited to be torn apart, hoping that the time it would take to rip him apart would save their life.

What Sam’s mind fixed on was the Trials. He’d never been so thankful for his efforts as then. If he hadn’t had a body that was trained to endure, to push through limits, to be destroyed and rebuilt over and over, he wouldn’t have made it to that church. Hell, if his instincts hadn’t led him to jump in front of a hellhound, he’d never have been there at all. But as it was, the Trials had been a perfect example of how to use your body and-- 

Sam was interrupted in his thoughts by something odd - a warm, glowing sensation that immediately brought Cas into his mind. The feeling of healing by Grace. He moved his mind back into the present, and focussed. Not Cas. Chuck. God was healing him back to almost normal health, and that couldn’t mean anything good. 

“Sam? You with me?”

Sam opened his eyes slowly, letting them adjust back to the light. Chuck stood over him, scalpel in hand, a slight smile on his face. 

“You tried to go away from me there, didn’t you Sammy?”

Sam bristled at that. No one else got to use that name, least of all Chuck.

“Well don’t worry. We’re going on a little trip. Ever wanted to see the future?”

As Chuck held up a pocket watch, Sam felt his heart drop. His body, he could control. But his mind... Sam knew all too well how many cracks there were in his mind. He steeled himself, building up the walls in his mind like he’d been taught. And behind those walls, he put Dean. He’d be here soon, to save him. Like always.


End file.
